Contextualizing fat phobia in Western society

By: Neha Myneni ‘21

In 2016, 650 million adults were considered obese with 1.9 billion adults considered overweight, according to WHO. Obesity is measured with the BMI (Body Mass Index), which takes into consideration a person’s height and weight before returning a corresponding number. (The specific equation is the weight divided by the square of the height.)

At this point, the BMI has become a widely accepted and understood method for measuring fatness in a person and in a population, where a BMI of greater than 30 has become the threshold for obesity. However, not only is this fact misunderstood, it is even downright inaccurate in certain situations.

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The BMI was created by a Belgian statistician named Adolphe Quetelet between 1830 and 1850, who was attempting to find the “average man” by using the modern-day BMI calculation. The National Institutes of Health even goes so far as to state, the “proper use [of BMI] in contemporary clinical practice generally requires that other factors also be taken into account,” referring to factors other than height and weight. This is because Quetelet specifically tailored his research to Belgians, meaning that without accounting for other factors, the BMI uses standards of the Belgian population and applies them to other populations (country, profession, etc.), with inevitably different standards.

However, the difference in population standards only implies that the BMI has often been utilized incorrectly in medical situations. But aren’t there still several health problems linked to obesity? While obesity can pose real health concerns, two points need to be made clear: First, as mentioned above, with a BMI that incorrectly measures obesity in populations, obese people who would be at greater risk for health conditions are much harder to be found and second, there are social consequences of weight that exist wholly outside the medical realm through fat phobia. People have argued that the social consequences of weight, specifically for those who are overweight or obese, are motivators for them to lose weight and become “healthy” (one example is when Bill Maher wanted to bring back fat shaming to manage obesity in the United States). This is blatantly untrue.

A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology focused on how the stigma around weight affected women of different weights, proving the opposite of the supposed “benefits” of perpetuating fat phobia. “Weight stigma led overweight but not non overweight women to consume more calories...Weight stigma reduced perceived dietary control among overweight women.” Not only does the social stigma fail to encourage overweight women to lose weight, it actively increases their caloric intake and reduces their perceived dietary control. There is also a psychological toll, as reported in Monte Nido, where the “percentage of pre-adolescent children hospitalized for eating disorders rose nearly 120 percent between 1999 and 2006.”

Why do Western societies so heavily look down on those who they consider to be “fat”? Sabrina Strings, the UC Irvine assistant professor of sociology and the author of “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia,” explains this in an interview with the The University of California.

“Fat phobia is not based on health concerns,” said Strings. “What I found in my research is that in the West, it’s actually rooted in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Protestantism…. By the 18th century, skin color (after years of interracial sex in the colonies) proved a poor sorting mechanism. What we had by the 19th century was a new racial discourse that suggested black people were also inherently voracious.”

Strings is able to trace the origins of the Western perception of obesity back to the initial slave trade and slavery, after skin color was no longer a guaranteed way of differentiating between Black and white people. For reference, the transatlantic slave trade primarily took place between 1525 and 1600, centuries before Quetelet would come up with his idea for the BMI. As such, the social implications existed long before anyone understood the medical implications of fatness, effectively disproving the idea that the social consequences are in any way beneficial for overweight or obese people.

At the same time, there are health concerns tied to obesity and weight. The WHO even mentions several noncommunicable conditions that obese people are at a higher risk for, including “cardiovascular diseases (mainly heart disease and stroke), which were the leading cause of death in 2012; diabetes; musculoskeletal disorders (especially osteoarthritis – a highly disabling degenerative disease of the joints); some cancers (including endometrial, breast, ovarian, prostate, liver, gallbladder, kidney, and colon).” However, they too measure obesity as directly tied to the BMI, without accounting for the many other factors that must be taken into consideration in order to determine the obesity of a specific individual in a population.

For example, referring back to the NIH study linked above, wrestlers typically have fluctuating values for BMI as they lose weight and gain muscle mass depending on their situation. In addition, it has been shown that Asian populations, particularly those from the Indian subcontinent, tend to “carry a proportionately higher fat mass for a given BMI than Caucasians,” while the “reverse is true for most black people and for Polynesians.” So, Asians can be regarded as unhealthy or obese at a lower value than the considered values for white populations while Black people and Polynesians can still be considered as not obese at values even greater.

Jasmine Love, the Director of Inclusion and Outreach at the upper school, describes a difference of body acceptance between different communities.

“It has been my experience that there may be a wider acceptance for all body types in the Black community – in general a feeling that being larger is ok and not as judged as in some other communities – an acceptance of curves and generally seeing beauty in a variety of sizes.” said Love.

As mentioned, global obesity has been tied to several diseases as a major risk factor, but with a measure that often fails to account for the specifics of a population, it is increasingly difficult to determine who in fact is “obese.” At the same time, fat shaming and fat phobia in the larger Western society relies entirely on perception from their basis in our national history, not any medical or scientific reasoning, often worsening the dietary control and increasing the caloric intake of overweight people as well as failing to account for factors behind obesity.

Bianca Nakayama, a health and science teacher in the Upper School with a Master’s degree in Biology, defines fat phobia as a “...fear of fat people or fatness. But it also encompasses thin privilege -- the benefits given to thin people in our culture. For instance, thin people can easily buy clothes, fit into airplane seats and typical furniture, get better treatment at the doctor's office, be hired at a job without regard to their body shape, etc.”

A poll in Reuters published in Monte Nido exposed that “Over 60 percent of people polled said that obese individuals are obese due to ‘making personal choices about exercising and eating’...even though we know that obesity is not a “personal” choice. Genetics, parenting styles, the diminishing availability of manual labor jobs, economic status and undiagnosed medical problems are all proven causes of obesity.”

Obesity is complex and is caused by many factors, but without a reasonable way of measuring it and with severe social implications for people society considers overweight or obese, this larger framework around weight only serves to harm everyone, increasing the risk of eating disorders and emotional eating.

Listed below are some resources for further reading.
Accounts From People who have Experienced Fat Phobia:

Modern Examples of Fat Phobia:

Causes of Fat Phobia:

Effects of Fat Phobia/Fat Shaming: